Current Accessibility Feature:
According to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) working group, web sites should be accessible to all users. This means that people with disabilities can “perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web” as well as contribute to it (W3C, 2005). As such, EJ’s Cake Shop is committed to making our content accessible to all users now, and in the future.
On our website, we have attached alternative text labels (ALT text) to all images on our site. As our products are physical items, we naturally have a mass of photographs on our site. We have given these descriptive, alternative labels so that readers who use screen readers or other disability technologies can have access to our content.
Future Upgrades:
EJ’s Cake Shop aims for our website to be perceivable, operable and understandable for all users and at the same time robust enough to adapt to current and future technologies (Chapman and Chapman, 2006, 504). As our users come from a large range of age groups with varying reading levels and technology use (including those with disabilities), we aim to improve our site in the future by ensuring it complies with W3Cs standards.
Accessibility features we aim to introduce in the future include: captions and transcripts for our YouTube tutorials on our site and the ability for our full site to be accessed without a mouse. This would allow access to our content for disabled users who use technologies that simulate keystrokes.
Disadvantages/Advantages:
Both of these future features require staff time and skills that we do not currently have. Upgrades to our site will also cause it to be down for short period of time.
As such, we will have to hire a dedicated IT staff member to maintain our web site and ensure it is accessible for all with minimal disruption. As we are currently trying to expand our business, we feel that these are necessary upgrades where the benefits will far outweigh the negatives.
References:
Chapman, N.
& Chapman, J. (2006). Web design: A complete introduction.
West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.
Felke-Morris, T. (2013). Web development & design foundations with HTML5, 6th ed., Boston: Pearson.
World Wide Web
Consortium. (2005). Introduction to Web accessibility. Web
Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Retrieved: May 20, 2013, From: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php
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